1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to managing and navigating document summary information, and more particularly, to a solution for managing and navigating document summary information for a large number of documents (e.g., the content of the World Wide Web).
2. Background Art
Current solutions for browsing a content source, such as the World Wide Web, that includes a large number of documents provide relatively few organizational options. For example, a search engine may sort summary information for documents (e.g., web pages and other types of accessible files) by the presumed relevance of the entered search term(s). However, the display page for the results of a typical search frequently has a relatively short list of the resulting content. Consequently, the user is required to manually scroll through many display pages of results in order to locate the summary information for documents assigned a lower relevance by the search engine. In order to provide additional information in fewer display pages, a search engine may limit the number of documents at a particular location (e.g., web site) for which summary information is displayed. Further, some browsing solutions provide a taxonomic division and clustering of the documents that can be navigated to limit the searched and/or relevant documents for which summary information will be displayed.
On a smaller scale, numerous solutions effectively collate document summary information. In particular, document summary information is frequently collated into a hierarchy of categories, or the like. Similarly, messages and responses generated as part of a discussion forum or the like can be collated into a hierarchical structure. In either case, the user can selectively “drill down” the hierarchy by selecting a desired category/message (e.g., clicking on a “twisty” control). Further, current solutions frequently purge the collation document summary information that corresponds to a document to which a particular user does not have access privileges.
For example, the Lotus Notes® messaging and groupware software offered by International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y. (IBM) can dynamically maintain and present document summary information in various types of user-defined and/or pre-de fined collations. However, current implementations of this type of technology are too inefficient to effectively manage the extremely large numbers of diverse documents that are available over large content sources such as the World Wide Web or the like.
In light of the above, a need exists for an improved solution for managing document summary information. In particular, there exists a need for a solution capable of managing one or more collations of document summary information for documents available from a data source such as the world wide web.